A Ten Point Plan to Defeat ISIS. By K.T. McFarland.

A ten point plan to defeat ISIS. By K.T. McFarland. FoxNews.com, November 17, 2015.

McFarland:

While Paris was still reeling under a state of emergency, President Obama took to the stage at the G-20 conference in Turkey to declare his policy to defeat ISIS a success. He had no plans to change course and no time to deal with critics who disagreed. Just days after ISIS ratcheted up their ambitions to conduct mass casualty attacks against the West, the president persisted in claiming his policy was working. President Obama continues to show a stunning and willful blindness to the tragedies all around him.

Meanwhile, the Russians and the French have started fighting back, launching airstrikes against the ISIS capital. As the days go on, more and more nations feel radical Islam’s sting and struggle with how to respond. The world is screaming out for U.S. leadership, but the president just isn’t up to the job.

It is slowly dawning on the West that radical Islam is the existential threat of our times, as fascism was in World War II, as communism was in the Cold War. We can’t cooperate with it, we can’t convert it and we can’t contain it. We must defeat it.

But so far we have no Churchill or FDR, no Reagan or Thatcher or Pope John Paul II. Obama has made it abundantly clear that he’s not budging. He says the U.S. will not send troops into the region, and he uses that as an excuse to do nothing. He says critics have suggested things he’s already doing. He says if anybody has a better plan, he hasn’t seen it.

Mr. President, here is what a better plan looks like. It’s the same plan that won World War II and the Cold War. The U.S. led in both victories, and the U.S. is the only country than can lead this time.  Those victories were multifaceted and multinational.

To defeat radical Islam, the United States should bring together all of Western civilization, combining our economic, political, ideological and diplomatic weapons, our intelligence and cyber capabilities, and our armed forces. No one country acting alone can defeat radical Islam. Everyone has his own role to play. But it won’t happen without America taking the lead.

First, assemble an alliance of nations that are threatened by radical Islam. We may have to hold our noses and work with leaders and countries we have differences with, as we did with the USSR during World War II. But we can put aside those differences temporarily to deal with the immediate threat. Putin, Assad, even the hacktivist group Anonymous could play a role.

The president insists the U.S. won’t send ground forces back to the Middle East. But this is still a military campaign. There is collateral damage in war.  We can try to minimize it, but not at the expense of losing this war.

Second, cut off ISIS’ funding. Bomb their oil fields and refineries. Destroy the pipelines, trucks and tankers taking ISIS oil to market. Use the U.S. banking system to track and freeze ISIS’ assets and sanction any country and company doing business with them.

Third, get tough with our Arab allies. Many Gulf Arab states have wealthy citizens who support radical Islamist groups. Tell those leaders they should police their own and shut down the funding streams. If they don’t, we won’t lift a finger to help them when radical Islamist groups bring the fight to their lands.

Fourth, launch a propaganda war to win the hearts and minds of those whose minds are still open. Use social media for disinformation campaigns. Counter every ISIS video of beheadings with videos showing jihadists blown to bits. – Showing terrorists committing unspeakable acts of violence doesn’t turn recruits off, it attracts them. The only way to discourage new followers is to show ISIS as weak, confused and in decline.

Fifth, encourage Islam’s leading clerics to speak out against the extremists.  Two of the most respected and important leaders in Islam, the Grand Imam of Al Azhar University and Cairo’s Grand Mutfi, have taken strong stands. We can help spread their messages.

Sixth, launch cyberwarfare against ISIS. Invade their safe havens on the Internet. Disrupt their networks. Radical Islam has dominated this space while we play catch-up.  Even worse, we have tried to conduct our efforts with one hand tied behind our back.

Seventh, arm our allies. We should give anyone willing to stand up and fight ISIS whatever he needs. Arm the Kurds and the Anbar Sunni tribes directly. Give weapons and aid to Jordan, Egypt and Israel.

Eighth, discard political correctness. We reacted to September 11 by treating everyone alike. The grandmother traveling with her grandkids to Disney World was given the same level of scrutiny as the young man with multiple visits to North Waziristan who traveled without luggage on a one-way ticket he paid for in cash. A better way to use our resources efficiently is to profile for terrorist behavior patterns. If we focus on everyone, we focus on no one.

Ninth, Don’t accept refugees we can’t vet. ISIS has already announced it will hide terrorists among the hordes of refugees flooding Europe and hoping to enter the U.S. The directors of the FBI, the CIA and the National Intelligence Agency have all issued warnings about the difficulty of vetting refugees headed for the U.S. Americans can help best by offering humanitarian assistance to keep refugees in the region, helping those of fighting age to stand and fight ISIS.

And finally, 10th, accept that we will constantly need to adapt our strategies and tactics to deal with radical Islamists. President George W. Bush tried to destroy radical Islam by sending in hundreds of thousands of troops to fight in Iraq, and failed. Obama tried withdrawing from the region, and that failed, too.

Yet the threat continues to grow. It has taken different forms over the years – Al Qaeda, ISIS, Boko Haram, al Nusra front – and it will no doubt wear other faces in the years ahead. But it’s the same enemy: religious fanatics driven by the core belief that they have been chosen by Allah to establish a caliphate that rules the world. They will kill any and all who stand in their way – Christians, Jews, Muslims – in the Middle East and worldwide.

Since they’re convinced they will prevail in the inevitable clash of civilizations, they’re not worried about the scope of the battle, or the levels of destruction, or even dying in the process. In fact, they are eager to bring on the end times, since they believe their triumph over the infidels is preordained.

We can laugh at the absurdity of their goals, or dismiss them as the “JV team,” or try to win their hearts and minds, or divert their anger with a jobs summit.

This is an enemy we can defeat. But our efforts need a leader. It can’t be Putin, and it can’t be Hollande. America is the only nation with the bandwidth, clout and power to assemble Western civilization and unite us in this long war.

Now all we need is a leader who is up to the task.

The GOP-ISIS Nightmare Coalition. By Andrew O’Hehir.

The GOP-ISIS nightmare coalition: Islamic extremists and the anti-immigrant right have the same goal — the death of democracy. By Andrew O’Hehir. Salon, November 21, 2015.

O’Hehir:

Terrorists and the far right both see democracy as a decadent failure; at least ISIS admits they want to destroy it.

Amid all the terror and panic and xenophobic hysteria of the Paris aftermath — which seems to have set the dial on the political Way-Back Machine to about 2002, at least for now — Republicans actually have a point. Maybe it’s half a point, because when Donald Trump or Ted Cruz (or Marine Le Pen) raise the contested question of whether Islam is compatible with democracy, they don’t really understand the basic terms of the question, let alone where it leads.

I will jump ahead here and suggest that you don’t get to ask that leading question about Islam and democracy, which has been the subject of considerable scholarly debate, without asking a number of corollary questions. What do we mean by Islam, and what do we mean by democracy? Is “democracy,” as we currently understand it and experience it, actually compatible with the idea of democracy as it was handed down from antiquity and reconceived by the Enlightenment? But it does no good for people on the left who claim to stand for democracy, and for its associated values of human rights and civil liberties, to pretend that the questions about Islam and democracy do not exist or do not matter, or that they have been settled. The killings in the 11th arrondissement, and the reaction throughout the West, should be enough to tell us that isn’t so.

It gives me absolutely no pleasure to insist that on this question, as on others, the Islamist militants of ISIS and the anti-Islamic Western right have reached the same conclusion. To put it more bluntly, every major Republican presidential candidate (excepting one or two of Jeb Bush’s multiple personalities) largely subscribes to the political and philosophical worldview of ISIS, except when it comes to final eschatological questions about who ends up in Paradise.

Indeed, in both cases the idea that Islam and democracy are incompatible is more like an essential premise than a conclusion, and the kinship goes much deeper than that. Both sides begin with the same diagnosis, which is that Western civilization faces a fundamental, existential crisis, and arrive at closely allied prescriptions aimed at producing closely related outcomes. In one case, Western democracy is seen as a corrupt and decadent sham that will simply be destroyed (and perhaps, in some fantasy future, subjugated to Islamic rule). In the other, Western democracy is corrupt and decadent and so on, and it must be destroyed in order to save it.

This meeting of minds and convergence of interests is not good news for the future of Islam or the future of Western democracy or the future of the human species. Personally, I’m not interested in the left-liberal tendency to use this for partisan political purposes: There are more important things at stake here than winning the next election, and in any event this issue feels like a lose-lose for everyone. It’s definitely not good news for those who want to resist both militant Islam and right-wing bigotry, as witness the political gymnastics performed in recent days by French President François Hollande and Hillary Clinton and even Bernie Sanders.

Clinton’s post-Parisian lurch to the right is obviously a strategic maneuver designed to fend off charges that she’s a terrorist-coddling crypto-Muslim in the mold of Barack Hussein Obama. It should also serve to remind both Clinton’s fans and detractors who she really is: a classic “Cold War liberal,” progressive on domestic social issues (at least within the frame of neoliberal economic and fiscal policy) but supremely hawkish when it comes to foreign policy and national security. Whether that combination reflects genuine principle or sheer political calculation I couldn’t say, and with Hillary Clinton I’m not sure there’s a difference. In her best possible incarnation, she might be President Hubert Humphrey, albeit imprisoned by a political climate HHH could never have imagined.

This point about the ideological marriage of ISIS and the Republicans has been made in various ways by various commentators since the Paris attacks — I made it myself in the immediate aftermath, even if I “buried the lede” — but I don’t think it can be restated often enough. Strategists of the Islamic State want Western regimes to persecute and marginalize Muslim citizens, crack down on immigration and squander their financial and political capital on a military response that is unlikely to produce a clear-cut victory and highly likely to harden anti-Western attitudes in the Islamic world. A similar approach worked brilliantly for Osama bin Laden in 2001 — better than he expected, I would guess — and ISIS possesses a far more sophisticated understanding of Western politics and culture than Osama and the old-school al-Qaida leadership ever did.

ISIS has repeatedly made clear, in its own English-language publications, that it seeks to divide the world between the infidel Crusader West and the purifying force of radical Islam, and to destroy any “gray zone” of accommodation or détente that lies between those stereotypical extremes. As scholar Bernard Lewis explained in an extended discourse on this subject back in 1993 (long before he suckered himself into becoming a war cheerleader), the most important target of Islamic fundamentalism was not the West itself but “pseudo-Muslim apostates” who had abandoned the true faith and become corrupted by secular foreign ideologies like liberalism or socialism or nationalism. This also could not possibly be clearer in the case of ISIS, which has murdered many times more Muslims than Westerners and whose ideological outreach is all about providing unemployed and disaffected Muslim youth in Europe and North America (many from secular families) a renewed sense of identity and community.

Some Republicans and European right-wingers are intelligent enough to understand all this, one must assume. It’s not some breathtaking new analysis to assert that the conflict between the West and violent Islamic extremism — and the conflict within the Muslim world itself — has more to do with ideology and economic conditions than with bombing sorties and “boots on the ground.” Either the leaders of the xenophobic right do not agree that they are doing exactly what ISIS wants them to do or they don’t care, and both possibilities are equally puzzling. My conclusion is that some don’t know and others don’t care, and that none of them can help themselves. They are driven forward by larger forces they cannot resist or control — by the populist upsurge of fear and animosity that is driving the No Syrian Grandmas movement, and by their not-so-secret conviction that the Islamist militants are right about the decrepit condition of Western civilization and democracy.

For at least the last 20 years and arguably closer to the last 50, the Republican Party has bet its future on appealing to a constantly shrinking electoral quadrant of exurban whites, largely in the South and Southwest. Throughout that period, the basis of that appeal has been the idea that America and Americanism (as core Republican voters understood those things) were in critical danger and under constant attack from within, from feminism and multiculturalism and the P.C. thought police, from Adam-and-Steve wedding cakes and the “war on Christmas” and white people who drove Volvos and wore funny glasses and drank chai lattes. Drive through any rural region of the United States — in my case, the impoverished hinterlands of central New York State, barely three hours from Manhattan — and you’ll encounter those “Take Back Our Country” lawn signs. No one on any side of the question needs to ask from whom.

It’s glaringly obvious, or at least it should be, that those are exactly the same tendencies that the leaders of ISIS and Osama bin Laden and the Taliban perceive and despise in the West. Much of that derives from Sayyid Qutb, the intellectual godfather of modern Islamic extremism, who published his influential critique “The America That I Have Seen” after spending two years in various parts of the U.S. in the late 1940s. Qutb excoriated America for its “deviant chaos” and its focus on “animalistic desires, pleasures, and awful sins.” He probably never imagined the prospect of same-sex weddings, gender-neutral bathrooms or Kardashian-centric reality TV, but would have perceived such outrageous developments as logical results of America’s fundamental depravity.

Some of Qutb’s complaints about materialism, consumerism and economic inequality, in fairness, are more redolent of left-wing moralizing, and those elements too can be found in contemporary Islamist rhetoric. But he was especially obsessed with the widespread secularism of American life, with the growing cultural influence of black people (whom he described as “bestial” and “noisy”) and with the sexual and intellectual freedom of women. Remember, this was 1949! He sounds like a horndog Baptist preacher out of some overcooked satirical novel when he inveighs against the “seductive capacity” of the American female, found in her “expressive eyes, and thirsty lips … in the round breasts, the full buttocks, and in the shapely thighs.” Whatever research Qutb may have undertaken on that subject during his time in Colorado and California was for the benefit of Islam, to be sure.

My point is not merely that puritanism of all stripes has common roots and common goals, and always calls for a return to some bygone era of virtue that almost certainly never existed. That’s a point worth making, but here’s the real secret sauce that binds the insane doctrines of ISIS to the Republican Party madhouse of Donald Trump and Ted Cruz: They both perceive all this decadence and moral relativism and loss of faith as the consequence of 200-odd years of democratic malpractice. One side has the decency to say openly that the legacy of 1776 and 1789 was complete bullshit from the get-go, nothing more than a high-minded pretext for imperial conquest and endless self-indulgence. The other side — and I think you know the one I mean — must pretend that democracy is or was a good idea, at least until it was distorted by Communist mind control or the Black Panthers or the 14th Amendment, while doing everything possible to undermine it.

I don’t suspect I need to lay out here all the ways that the American right, faced with an evident demographic disadvantage, has sought to disenfranchise its opponents, poison the political and legislative process and transfer power to the super-rich. As I and others have repeatedly observed, the great victory of the Koch brothers and the Republican brain trust in the 2014 midterm election lay not just in the GOP’s huge congressional majority but in the shocking 36.6 percent turnout, the lowest in any national election since World War II. The American right cannot return to a system where only property-owning white men are allowed to vote, at least not without visibly ripping up the Constitution. But it has gone a long way toward creating an environment that discourages and disheartens everyone else, and where the Angry White Male vote is coddled and inflamed and privileged in numerous ways.

As strange as this may sound, I do not doubt the faith that lies behind the right-wing distaste for democracy, or at least no more than I doubt the conflicted zealotry that lies behind militant Islam. Both sides correctly observe that the various strains of post-Jeffersonian democracy in the Western world have been plagued with problems from the beginning, and now face a dire crisis. Both the Western right and fundamentalist Islam yearn to pull their societies back toward a purer distillation of faith and a collective sense of purpose, and what could serve that purpose better than an apocalyptic “clash of civilizations”? They see the salvation of their respective societies in the rejection of the flabby ideal of democracy, explicitly or otherwise, and its replacement with a more virile, more godly and more effective system.

Is Islam compatible with democracy? Scholars have batted that one around for decades without arriving at a clear yes-or-no answer. Roughly 40 percent of the world’s Muslims live in nominal democracies now, for whatever that’s worth, and the popular appetite for democracy demonstrated by the Arab Spring was unmistakable, if also unfulfillable. But it strikes me as the wrong question. We might as well ask whether capitalism is compatible with democracy, or whether human nature is. As Justice Louis Brandeis may have said (like so many famous quotations, this one is tough to pin down), we can have democracy or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both. By that standard we have never had democracy, and quite likely never will.

Dealing With the Islamic State Demands Patience, Not Panic. By Fareed Zakaria.

Dealing with the Islamic State demands patience, not panic. By Fareed Zakaria. Washington Post, November 19, 2015.

Zakaria:

Henry Kissinger has noted that in his adult lifetime, the United States has fought five major wars and began each one with great enthusiasm and public support. But in each of them, Americans soon began to ask, “How quickly can you withdraw?” In three of these conflicts, he says, the United States withdrew its forces unilaterally. Today we are watching a similarly powerful, and understandable, enthusiasm for an expanded war against the Islamic State. Let us make sure we understand what it would entail not just to start it but also to end it.

One place to learn some lessons might be from a strategy that has been relatively successful: the war against al-Qaeda. As Peter Bergen noted in 2012, a year after Osama bin Laden’s death, the group’s leadership had been destroyed, its resources had disappeared and its support among the Arab public had plummeted. It has not launched an attack on Western soil since the London bombings 10 years ago.

The picture did not always look like that. After 9/11, officials and experts spoke of al-Qaeda with the awe and fear they now reserve for the Islamic State. Once the United States and its allies began battling the group, it inspired or directed several attacks across the globe, including the bloodiest in the West since 9/11, the 2004 Madrid train bombings, which killed 191 people. But those attacks did not mean al-Qaeda was “winning” the war on terrorism any more than the attacks in Paris last week mean that the Islamic State is winning. In fact, it’s possible that as the Islamic State loses territory on the ground, it is resorting to terrorism abroad.

What explains the success against al-Qaeda? Many experts point to the genuinely global counterterrorism operations, especially the sharing of intelligence. Others note that the group overplayed its hand in Iraq.

In one of the best books on the topic, “Hunting in the Shadows,” Seth Jones concludes that whenever the United States adopted a “light-footprint strategy” — Special Operations forces, covert intelligence and law enforcement — it did well. Whenever the United States and its allies sent troops into Muslim countries, he notes, “al-Qaeda has benefited through increased radicalization and additional recruits.” This is why from the start, the Islamic State has sought to bait Western countries into sending troops to Syria.

Defeating the group militarily would not be difficult. But to keep it defeated, someone would have to rule its territories or else it, or a variant, would just come back. The Islamic State draws its support from Sunnis in Iraq and Syria who feel persecuted by the non-Sunni governments in both countries. In addition, the group has created a functioning state that provides some measure of stability for a population that has been battered over the past decade.

In this sense, the Islamic State is more akin to the Taliban than al-Qaeda, which was a gang of foreigners lodged in Afghanistan as guests of the Taliban. But the Taliban itself is a local group, with support in the Pashtun communities of Afghanistan and Pakistan. This explains why the United States has not defeated it, after 14 years of warfare and tens of thousands of American soldiers and now many more Afghan troops. Keep in mind that in Afghanistan, the United States has a decent local ally that has considerable legitimacy. In Syria, it has none. The Kurds are a crucial ally and should become even more important in the months ahead. Still, as an ethnic minority, they cannot govern Arab lands.

Politicians call on the United States to build up an army of moderate Syrians. It is a worthwhile endeavor. But historically, when foreigners have helped put together local forces, those forces have usually lacked legitimacy and staying power — think of the Cubans who landed at the Bay of Pigs, the South Vietnamese regime or Washington’s favored Iraqi exiles. This essential problem — the lack of a credible local ally — makes ground operations in Syria harder than in Iraq, Afghanistan or Vietnam.

This is not to counsel despair but to suggest “strategic patience,” as President Obama rightly says. The Islamic State is not nearly as strong as the hysteria of the moment suggests. It is surrounded by deadly foes. Many countries are fighting it — Sunni Saudi Arabia and Shiite Iran, the United States and Vladimir Putin’s Russia, neighboring Jordan and faraway France. Its territory is shrinking, and its message is deeply unpopular to most in its supposed “caliphate” — witness the hundreds of thousands of Syrian refugees fleeing its barbarism.

Counterterrorism, intelligence, airstrikes, drones and Special Operations are arenas where the West has the advantage — it has the money, technology, know-how and international cooperation. And it can hammer away for months, even years. If instead, panicked by terrorism, we were to send American soldiers into the deserts of Syria, we would enter the one arena where the Islamic State has the decisive advantage. And after a few inconclusive years, people would start asking, “How quickly can you withdraw?”

The End of Obamaworld: A Failed President. By Patrick J. Buchanan.

The End of Obamaworld: A Failed President. By Patrick J. Buchanan. Human Events, November 20, 2015. Also at Townhall, WND, Buchanan.org.

Malzberg | Patrick J. Buchanan discusses the terror attacks in Paris and Obama’s response. Video. The Steve Malzberg Show. NewsmaxTV, November 18, 2015. YouTube.






Buchanan:

Nations have a right to preserve their own unique identity.

In denouncing Republicans as “scared of widows and orphans,” and castigating those who prefer Christian refugees to Muslims coming to America, Barack Obama has come off as petulant and unpresidential.

Clearly, he is upset. And with good reason.

He grossly, transparently underestimated the ability of ISIS, the “JV” team, to strike outside the caliphate into the heart of the West, and has egg all over his face. More critically, the liberal world order he has been preaching and predicting is receding before our eyes.

Suddenly, his rhetoric is discordantly out of touch with reality. And, for his time on the global stage, the phrase “failed president” comes to mind.

What happened in Paris, said President Obama, “was an attack on all of humanity and the universal values that we share.”

And just what might those “universal values” be?

At a soccer game between Turkey and Greece in Istanbul, Turks booed during the moment of silence for the Paris dead and chanted “Allahu Akbar.” Among 1.6 billion Muslims, hundreds of millions do not share our values regarding women’s rights, abortion, homosexuality, free speech, or the equality of all religious faiths.

Set aside the fanatics of ISIS. Does Saudi Arabia share Obama’s views and values regarding sexual freedom and the equality of Christianity, Judaism and Islam? Is anything like the First Amendment operative across the Sunni or Shiite world, or in China?

In their belief in the innate superiority of their Islamic faith and the culture and civilization it created, Muslims have more in common with our confident Christian ancestors who conquered them than with gauzy global egalitarians like Barack Obama.

“Liberte, egalite, fraternite” the values of secular France, are no more shared by the Islamic world than is France’s affection for Charlie Hebdo.

Across both Europe and the United States, the lurch away from liberalism, on immigration, borders and security, fairly astonishes.

But again, understandably so.

Many of the Muslim immigrants in Britain, France and Germany have never assimilated. Within these countries are huge enclaves of the alienated and their militant offspring.

Consider the Belgium capital of Brussels. Belgium’s home affairs minister Jan Jambon said his government does not “have control of the situation in Molenbeek.”

Brice De Ruyver, a security adviser to a former Belgian prime minister says, “We don’t officially have no-go zones in Brussels, but in reality, there are, and they are in Molenbeek.”

According to The Wall Street Journal, after the Paris attacks, “French security forces … conducted hundreds of antiterror raids and placed more than 100 suspects under arrest. … France has some 11,500 names on government watch lists.”

How many of those 11,500 are of Arab descent or the Muslim faith?

The nations of the EU are beginning to look again at their borders, and who is crossing them, who is coming in, and who is already there.

And the world is reawakening to truths long suppressed. Race and religion matter. To some they are life-and-death matters. Not all creeds, cultures and tribes are equally or easily assimilated into a Western nation. And First World nations have a right to preserve their own unique identity and character.

When Obama says that to prefer Christian to Muslim refugees is “un-American,” he is saying that all the U.S. immigration laws enacted before 1965 were un-American. And, so, too, were presidents like Calvin Coolidge who signed laws that virtually restricted immigration to Europeans.

Barack Obama may be our president, but who is this man of the left to dictate to us what is “un-American”?

Were presidents Harry Truman and Woodrow Wilson, who called ours a “Christian nation,” un-American? Did the Supreme Court uphold our “universal values” with Roe v. Wade in 1973 and the Obergefell decision on same-sex marriage last June?

The race issue, too, has returned to divide us.

Half a century after Selma bridge, we have “Black Lives Matter!” on college campuses claiming that universities like Missouri, Princeton, Yale and Dartmouth are riddled with institutional racism.

Attention must be paid, and reparations made, by white America. And a new generation of academic appeasers advances to grovel and ask how the university might make amends.

In Europe, tribalism and nationalism are on the march. Peoples and nations wish to preserve who they are. Some have begun to establish checkpoints and ignore the Schengen Agreement mandating open borders. Eastern Europeans have had all the diversity they can stand.

With Syrian passports missing, with ISIS besieged in its Syria-Iraq laager and urging suicide attacks in New York and Washington, we may be witness to more terrorist massacres and murders in the States.

The time may be at hand for a moratorium on all immigration, and a rewriting of the immigration laws to reflect the views and values of Middle Americans, rather than those of a morally arrogant multicultural elite.

Obamaworld is gone. We live again in an us-versus-them country in an us-versus-them world. And we shall likely never know another.

Sharyl Attkisson: Obama Will Not Read Intelligence Reports on Radical Islamist Groups.

Malzberg | Sharyl Attkisson on Obama and His Failure to Recognize Terrorist Groups Despite Advisers. Video. The Steve Malzberg Show. NewsmaxTV, November 18, 2015. YouTube. Video Excerpt.

Attkisson: Obama Won’t Read Intelligence on Groups He Doesn’t Consider “Terrorists.” By Todd Beamon. Newsmax, November 18, 2015.

Attkisson: Obama Won’t Read Intelligence on Groups He Doesn’t Consider “Terrorists.” By Pam Key. Breitbart, November 18, 2015.

Sharyl Attkisson: Obama Will Not Read Intelligence on U.S.-Recognized Terrorist Groups. By Tom Blumer. NewsBusters, November 19, 2015.

Sharyl Attkisson: Sources Say Obama Won’t Listen to Intel About Islamic Terrorist Groups. By Debra Heine. PJ Media, November 20, 2015.

Transcript Excerpt:

SHARYL ATTKISSON: ... I have talked to people who have worked in the Obama administration who firmly believe he has made up his mind, uh — I would say closed his mind, they say — to their intelligence that they’ve tried to bring him about various groups that he does not consider terrorists, even if they are on the U.S. list of designated terrorists.

He has his own ideas, and there are those who’ve known him a long time who say this dates back to law school. He does not necessarily — you may think this is a good trait you may think this is a bad trait — he does not necessarily listen to the people with whom he disagrees. He seems to dig in. That would be, I would suppose he would say because he thinks he’s right. He is facing formidable opposition on this particular point.

STEVE MALZBERG: So when he stands there and says, as he always does — no matter what the issue, you may notice this, I’m sure as a, as a reporter you may notice this, like I do — no matter what the issue, no matter what the topic, no matter what the press conference, if it’s a controversial thing where he’s getting pushback on this from anywhere, he’ll say, “I’m not the only one who believes this. Everybody believes this.” That’s a weakness, I think.

But you’re telling me that you’ve talked to people in his inner circle, or in the administration, that are telling you that even though there are groups that might be on our terror list, that are classified as terrorist groups, Obama, in his mind, doesn’t consider them to be terrorists. Because what, because they have a gripe?

ATTIKSSON: I don’t know the reason for it. I’ve only been told by those who have allegedly attempted to present him, or have been in the circle that has attempted to present him, with certain intelligence that they said he doesn’t want it. He said he doesn’t want it or he won’t read it, in some instances. 

A Conversation with Hillary Clinton at the Council on Foreign Relations.

A Conversation with Hillary Clinton. Hosted by Fareed Zakaria. Video and Transcript. Council on Foreign Relations, November 19, 2015. YouTube. Excerpt at Breitbart.

Clinton’s disingenuous speech on the Islamic State. By Jennifer Rubin. Washington Post, November 19, 2015.





Excerpt:

CLINTON: Online or offline, the bottom line is that we are in a contest of ideas against an ideology of hate, and we have to win. Let’s be clear, though. Islam is not our adversary. Muslims are peaceful and tolerant people and have nothing whatsoever to do with terrorism. The obsession in some quarters with a clash of civilization or repeating the specific words radical Islamic terrorism isn’t just a distraction. It gives these criminals, these murderers, more standing than they deserve. It actually plays into their hands by alienating partners we need by our side.

Our priority should be how to fight the enemy. In the end, it didn’t matter what kind of terrorist we called bin Laden. It mattered that we killed bin Laden. But we still can’t close our eyes to the fact that there is a distorted and dangerous stream of extremism within the Muslim world that continues to spread. Its adherents are relatively few in number but capable of causing profound damage, most especially to their own communities, throughout an arc of instability that stretches from North and West Africa to Asia.

Overlapping conflicts, collapsing state structures, widespread corruption, poverty, and repression have created openings for extremists to exploit. Before the Arab spring, I warned that the region’s foundations would sink into the sand without immediate reforms. Well, the need has only grown more urgent.

The Crisis Is Islam. By David Harsanyi.

The Crisis Is Islam. By David Harsanyi. The Federalist, November 16, 2015.

Harsanyi:

If we’re not talking about theology we’re not really talking about the problem.

Why is it that so many of the same people who are skeptical about exporting liberalism (count me as one) are perfectly content with the idea of importing illiberalism?

Even as the terrorist attacks in Paris were happening, a predictable debate broke out over the millions of Islamic refugees now pouring into the West from the Arab world. We were once again asked to pretend that Islamic terrorism materializes in a vacuum that has absolutely nothing to do with theological beliefs of the majority of people in the Middle East and thus nothing to do with brutality and oppression that prevail in the region.

One of the most common talking points regarding refugees has been this:

From the Vox piece:

Again, we still don’t know who’s to blame for the Paris attacks, whether a jihadist group was involved, or the motives involved. But if a jihadist group is the culprit, these kinds of terrorist organizations are exactly the kind of danger that many Syrian refugees are fleeing from. It is ISIS, after all, that has terrorized so much of Syria — and forced people to flee their homes to avoid violence.

This kind of emotional appeal avoids some very inconvenient facts. For starters, it looks like at least one of the attackers was a been (update: or posed) as a refugee from Syria. Put another way: he was a terrorist posing as a refugee — one of the most potent arguments refugee opponents offered.

Whatever the case, it’s true that most refugees are fleeing genuine and horrifying violence. But it is also true that many refugees bring with them — through their culture, ideology, and faith — the same conditions that bred the violence in the first place. It has nothing to do with what immigrants “look” like or how many superb and moral Muslims there are in the world (because there are many) and everything to do with what these refugees believe.

The vast majority of Muslims aren’t terrorists, but in the contemporary world nearly all movements and ideas that produce political terrorism are birthed in Islamic communities that house mostly peaceful people. Mass immigration bolsters those communities with hundreds of thousands of new, unassimilated adherents in the middle of secular nations with belief systems that grate against Islamic worldview. How can Europe not expect some of them will embrace the radicalism and fundamentalism adopted to some extent in nearly every other major Islamic community?

It doesn’t only manifest in terrorism, but in the medievalism of whippings, mass hangings, stoning, and violent misogyny and bigotry — not just mean words.

The tragedy of Syria should make us sympathetic to the plight of refugees fleeing murderers, but that doesn’t change the fact that — according to a Pew poll and every other reputable polling that’s been done on the topic — “overwhelming percentages of Muslims in many countries want Islamic law (sharia) to be the official law of the land.” The losers of civil war are victims, but that doesn’t mean they have liberal values. When the Arab world has been granted the right to vote, it almost always backs religious extremism. It votes for Hamas and for the Muslim Brotherhood. ISIS and Shia terror groups aren’t funded by Kickstarter; they are partly funded by forces in Gulf States, Iran, and throughout the Islamic world.

Here at home, the restraints of feigned tolerance make debating this issue seem like we’re living in kindergarten circle time. When John Dickerson asked the Democratic candidates if they would use the words “radical Islam” at the presidential debate on Saturday to describe the enemy, not one of them would do so. Like the two presidents before them, Democrats now function in a fantastical alternative reality where every denomination is equally decent (other than, perhaps, orthodox Christians here in U.S.) and all of humanity share the same values and the same dreams.

“This is an attack not just on Paris, it’s an attack not just on the people France, but this is an attack on all of humanity and the universal values we share,” Barack Obama explained after the attacks. All of humanity? No, it was an attack by fundamental Islam against Europeans. Just like 9/11 was an attack against the United States, stabbing civilians in the streets of Israel was an attack against Jews, and the Charlie Hebdo massacre was an attack against free expression.

When there is a deadly bombing in Beirut or horrifying assaults on civilian populations in Iraq or Syria, it is part of an ongoing factional religious war. This is not some ideology disconnected from all others that visits from outer space every few days to kill humans randomly. Yet, many of the same people who argue that ISIS was created by George Bush and climate change will also tell you that the group has nothing to do with Islam. It’s about economics. It’s about blowback. It’s about poverty. It’s about anything and everything but the theological war that’s actually going on.

None of this is to say Muslims can never assimilate in the West. The U.S., for the most part, proves the opposite. But there is nothing bigoted about being vigilant when embracing millions of new people who bring all kinds of illiberal baggage with them. If, as Ayaan Hirsi Ali says, we keep pretending this has nothing to do with Islam, we will never actually talk about the problem. There are many good Muslims, but if that’s the only criteria, no one will be able to be critical of any theology or ideology ever again.

To Defeat ISIS, Put Boots on the Ground. By David French.

To Defeat ISIS, Put Boots on the Ground. By David French. National Review Online, November 17, 2015.

French:

Since the Paris attacks there have been an avalanche of pledges to destroy ISIS, to wage “pitiless” or “merciless” war against the world’s worst and most bloodthirsty terrorist organization. Don’t listen. These pledges are just so much noise — so much hot air — unless the pledge is accompanied by a plan to put American boots on the ground, in close combat against ISIS, in sufficient numbers to not just defeat the jihadists but impose Surge-scale losses on ISIS personnel and infrastructure.

Politicians won’t say this, because they won’t lead. Instead, they’ll offer plans for increased air strikes — or perhaps increased use of the special forces (as if mere invocation of SEAL Team Six indicates political toughness) — and always they’ll go back to the Kurds. Again and again, we here the same formula: Kurds plus special forces plus more air strikes equals victory.

Wrong. It’s not enough, and it’s especially not enough against ISIS, a jihadist force that aspires to take and hold territory. Even if we turned Ramadi into rubble, so long as jihadists still live there, still control the remnants, and still shake their fists at the sky, then to millions of potential jihadists they are defying the West. They are winning. Bombing a city to rubble and then bombing the rubble won’t defeat ISIS. Breaking its hold on the actual land it controls will.

The key to ISIS’s powerful psychological hold on the imagination of radical Muslims is its military success — its power. It is living its theology, waging war for Allah — and winning. Its offensives last summer and fall may have since stalled, but their spectacular victories — some gained even after the United States joined the fight — still resonate.

From the ISIS point of view, they haven’t just withstood the West, they’ve expanded, with franchises in Egypt, North Africa (including Libya), and Nigeria. They’ve also increased their striking power, showing that they’re capable of striking grievous blows against two great powers — Russia and France — in one month. Indeed, one reason I’m particularly worried about a strike at home is that a strike here would serve as the climax of ISIS’s most recent terror campaign, proving to the world that no one is beyond its reach.

To counter ISIS’s dramatic and public victories, we must deal it more dramatic and more public defeats. It has to lose the seats of its power, starting in Iraq. Fred and Kimberly Kagan — strategists who helped conceive of the Surge, al-Qaeda’s first defeat in Iraq — have done yeoman’s work outlining a comprehensive, detailed military plan for defeating ISIS, a plan that includes deploying American brigade combat teams. In response to the Paris attacks, the Kagans outlined a number of necessary actions. I want to highlight the first three as particularly critical.

First: “Take the gloves off against ISIS in Iraq and Syria. Adjust the rules of engagement to accept the risk of collateral damage (civilian casualties), hit every ISIS target on our lists, and do as much damage as possible from the air quickly.” The point about the rules of engagement is absolutely vital. At present, our rules of engagement not only limit the number of targets we can engage, but they provide the enemy with known safe havens. Under the present rules of engagement, we could bomb Syria and Iraq for a decade and still not inflict sufficient losses on ISIS.

Second: “Put the necessary U.S. forces on the ground in Iraq to help the Iraqis retake Ramadi and Fallujah rapidly and prepare them to retake Mosul within six months.” This is the most important step. The Kagans seem to think we can accomplish this part of the mission with only 10,000 U.S. troops and no brigade combat teams. I’m skeptical that our Iraqi allies — even with American special forces, artillery, and aviation support — can do the job. While I’m happy to be wrong, we should deploy troops who can react with decisive force if and when the offensive stalls. Moreover, it’s highly likely we could do so with French (and perhaps British) support. A French brigade could make a decisive impact on the battlefield.

Third: “Don’t over-rely on Kurdish forces for rapid, decisive operations beyond Kurdish ethnic boundaries.” This can’t be emphasized enough. Too many American policymakers are looking to the Kurds as saviors, as the ground force that will relieve American soldiers of the need to once again lay their lives on the line in the Middle East. But striking significantly beyond Kurdish regions is bad for our strategy, and it’s bad for the Kurds. There would be few better ways to further inflame ethnic tensions (and increase ISIS’s recruitment) than to send brigades of Kurds into Sunni strongholds.

The combination of a devastating bombing campaign in Iraq and Syria and a decisive ground offensive in Iraq would inflict a crippling and humiliating defeat on ISIS. In all likelihood, it would also fatally  undermine ISIS’s position in Syria. It is entirely possible that competing Syrian militias would quickly crush a severely weakened ISIS. Thus, victory in Iraq could be followed by a brief pause in ground operations to assess the risks and benefits of large-scale intervention in Syria.

But what to do about Russia and the Assad regime? It’s difficult to imagine an end to the Syrian civil war while the Assad regime remains, but one can imagine an end to ISIS without an end to Assad. The Kagans recommend aggressive action (though not direct military intervention) to topple the Assad regime and remove Russia from Syria, but the U.S. should be extremely wary of attempting to impose a political or military solution to the Syrian civil war. Russia is stepping into a quagmire. America should exercise extreme caution before doing the same.

Flexibility is key. It’s often said that no plan survives its first contact with the enemy, and that would no doubt be the case in a serious fight with ISIS. The mission is to utterly destroy ISIS. The method — including numbers of troops deployed and targets engaged — is variable.

But we cannot even begin to wage war effectively when our people are unwilling and our leaders are weak. Now is not the time for political caution, for telling people what they want to hear. Now is the time for leadership, for bold truth-telling. Sadly, while our warriors are willing, our leaders are weak, and the best strategies are meaningless when politicians are unwilling to commit. We’ve learned the wrong lessons from Iraq. The United States didn’t abandon a failing, unwinnable fight. We snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. We must never do so again.

Fighting Just ISIS May Not Be Enough. By Husain Haqqani.

Fighting ISIS May Not Be Enough. By Husain Haqqani. The American Interest, November 17, 2015.

Haqqani:

The West needs to combat Islamist ideology too.

President Obama’s professed desire to contain the Islamic State is unlikely to succeed without a serious effort by the West and its Muslim allies to question the ideology and steady stream of conspiracy theories that feeds Islamist terrorism. Given the global nature and regenerative capacity of Islamist movements, limited action against one group will only result in the birth of another.

The Islamic State emerged out of al-Qaeda’s ashes just as the Obama Administration was celebrating its successful efforts to locate and kill Osama bin Laden. Military action against IS, though necessary, will likely result in a new mutation, just as al-Qaeda evolved as a violent strain of political Islam preached by groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood.

The West, led by the United States, won the Cold War because it confronted Communist beliefs in addition to restraining Soviet expansionism. But Western leaders—including all candidates for the Democratic presidential nomination for 2016—are reluctant to acknowledge that the West might be at war with radical Islam, out of concern for the prospect of unleashing a wave of bigotry against all Muslims.

But the falsified history and simplified explanations for Muslim decline that pass for discourse among Muslims has to be debunked if the West is to deny Islamists their raison d’être. The most practical way of denying further recruits to extremist Islamist groups is to systematically question and marginalize the outmoded theology of Islamic dominance at the heart of Islamist radicalism. A campaign to reject the dogma of Islamic supremacism would find many supporters among Muslims tired of the zealotry and self-righteousness of the Islamists.

An ideological struggle against radical Islam does not mean treating 1.4 billion Muslims worldwide as the West’s enemy. This huge population will not quit Islam by listening to television pundits in Europe and North America; nor will a ban on immigration prevent Western converts to radical Islamism from swelling the ranks of ISIS. Rather, it requires Muslims to examine the Islamists’ core belief that they must somehow be forcibly united, and that they have a God-given right to lead the world.

Soon after the 9/11 attacks, al-Qaeda ideologue Sayf al-din al-Ansari explained that the attacks were necessary to challenge the ascendancy of Western civilization. According to him, the Islamic community “cannot move in an orbit set by another.”

The Islamic State’s statement claiming responsibility for last Friday’s attacks in Paris declared that the attackers sought to “cast terror into the hearts” of the West. The attacks in France, patterned on the 2008 attacks in Mumbai, India, came within 48 hours of attacks in Beirut and Baghdad, reflecting the jihadis’ global reach.

Islamists target other Muslims to eliminate pluralism within Islam; causing fear and panic in Western society is part of the jihadis’ strategy to weaken and defeat Western civilization. The origins of al-Qaeda, IS, and other similar groups lie in recent Muslim history and ideology, not Western foreign policy.

Unlike Europe and North America, Muslim territories did not reach their contemporary status gradually. The British and the French in the Arabic-speaking lands, the Russians in Central Asia, the Dutch in Indonesia, and the British in India and Malaya brought new ideas and technology to Muslim lands as occupiers or colonizers.

Some Muslim leaders, especially in the 19th and early 20th centuries, opted to learn from and imitate the West. Kemal Atatürk, the founder of modern Turkey, told a peasant who asked him what Westernization meant: “It means being a better human being.” Others, however, recommended “revivalism,” or a search for lost glory through rejection of new ways and ideas.

Contemporary jihadis use modern means, including the internet and state-of-the-art weapons, to impose medieval beliefs in an effort to reclaim Islam’s global pre-eminence. The Muslim Brotherhood’s Egyptian founder, Hassan al-Banna, called upon Muslims “to regain their honor and superiority” in addition to recovering “their lost lands, their usurped regions and their occupied territories.”

While seeking honor or securing self-determination might be valid political objectives, the belief in the superiority of one’s community of believers only fosters fascism. Muslim countries have nosedived into turmoil, with the rise of those wanting to Islamize the modern world coming at the cost of those hoping to modernize the Muslim world.

There is a huge gap between the Islamist aspiration of dominating the world and the reality of the relatively poor political, economic, and educational status of Muslims in contemporary times. Muslims comprise 22 percent of the world’s population but account for only 7 percent of its economic output.

The number of new book titles published every year in Arabic, the language of 360 million, is the same as those published in Romanian, the mother tongue of only 24 million people. The annual figure for new book titles in Urdu, spoken by some 325 million South Asian Muslims, is comparable to that for Danish, spoken by some 5.6 million.

Muslim leaders and intellectuals have created a narrative of victimhood to explain Muslim debility, which in turn enables extremist groups to offer extreme strategies to change the circumstances. “We are weak and poor because we were colonized by the West” is a common refrain, whereas in reality colonization became possible because Muslim empires had already been weakened by failing to adopt new technologies and modes of production.

The jihadi plan for regaining Muslim pride is to challenge Western dominance by striking fear and terror in the hearts of Westerners. They are aided in their endeavor by the absence of discussion among Muslims of why all major ideas that define the contemporary world—from the joint stock company, banking, and insurance to freedom of speech—emerged in the West, or how these ideas, not just conspiracies and superior military technology, made the West ascendant in the past several centuries.

While the jihadis want a clash of civilizations, most ordinary Muslims are hesitant to examine their history or analyze their community’s prospects. Universities in most of the Muslim world focus on producing doctors, engineers, and people proficient in technical disciplines. As a result, even highly educated professionals embrace conspiracy theories about al-Qaeda and ISIS being Western puppets bent on dividing Muslims. Some who do not support the extremists still see value in their ability to at least challenge the arrogant West.

Military defeat alone will not rid the Muslim world of this intellectual malaise. Islamist movements use the humiliation of fellow believers as an opportunity for the mobilization and recruitment of dedicated followers. The resort to asymmetric warfare—the idea that a suicide bomber is a poor man’s F-16—has followed recent Muslim military defeats.

Yasser Arafat and his al-Fatah captured the imagination of young Palestinians only after the Arab defeat and loss of the West Bank in 1967. Islamic militancy in Kashmir can be traced to India’s military victory over Pakistan in the 1971 Bangladesh War. Revenge, rather than willingness to compromise or submit to the victors, is the traditional response of Islamists to the defeat of their armies.

Islamists represent a strain of revivalist thought that perceives a battle without a specific frontline and not limited in span to a few years or even decades. They think in terms of conflict spread over generations. A call for jihad against British rule in India, for example, resulted in an underground movement that began in 1830 and lasted until the 1870s, with remnants periodically surfacing well into the 20th century.

Western nations, together with Muslim allies, need a winning strategy for that generational conflict. They could encourage Muslims to recognize that success in the 21st century will not come from seeking restoration of the medieval order.

Jihadists are incubated in the anti-Western and anti-Semitic conversations and conspiracy theories that pervade the Muslim world. Islamists murder secularists and force many of them to leave their countries because they fear the seductive power of liberal ideas. In the first half of the 20th century, secular nationalism served as the antidote to Islamism.

But nationalist autocrats bred conspiracy theories themselves while strangulating freedom of thought. Instead of ushering in a Muslim enlightenment, authoritarian secularism only strengthened anti-Semitism and the search for the hidden hand manipulating Muslim nations and depriving them of their manifest destiny. Western nations and their Muslim allies embraced Islamists, who were rather weak at the time, in the context of their efforts to contain communism.

Now may be the time to reignite debate in Muslim countries about the real causes of Muslim debility. Western governments and even private organizations and individuals could help with wider circulation in native languages of material produced by Muslims who question the narrative that aids the Islamists.

Books and movies could be produced reflecting the ways that Muslim decline is caused not by Westernization but by poverty and ignorance, which cannot be over-turned by recreating the 7th century or sporadic attacks on Western cities. Support could be given to anti-Islamist political parties, just as non-communist groups were helped in several vulnerable countries during the Cold War. An international network of Muslim critics of radical Islam could reiterate and refine their message.

Some Muslim governments, notably the United Arab Emirates, have initiated efforts to debate and dispute the radical Islamist worldview. That effort needs to expand to include Western countries with substantial Muslim populations, as well as Muslim countries, which tend to produce disproportionately larger number of Jihadi recruits.

In countries like Pakistan (deemed a Western ally) the Jihadi narrative is sustained by the government and media to help groups that advance regional strategic objectives. But it inadvertently also advances the cause of jihadis that are out of the state’s control.

By refusing to identify radical Islam (not all Muslims) as the problem, Western leaders end up reinforcing the Islamist view that they are succeeding in rattling or confusing the West. A concerted ideological campaign, like the one that discredited and contained communism, run by Muslim allies would be the Islamists’ worst nightmare. It would augment military action and counter-terrorist operations against jihadi safe havens and would prevent the breeding of future jihadis.